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GEP SMART vs SAP Ariba Procurement comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
640
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (1st), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
GEP SMART
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Procurement Software (3rd), Contract Management Software (8th)
SAP Ariba Procurement
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Procurement Software (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
CJ
Senior Product Manager at a university with 10,001+ employees
Doesn't require a background in analytics to run reports
SMART has been helpful for sourcing and public bids. For regulatory purposes, our university posts bids, depending on the scope of the bid. We get a lot of value out of SMART's ability to post to a public site and have suppliers see that information, register in the tool, and participate. SMART features for collecting information and its timeline capabilities are highly useful. Then on the contract side, the reporting capabilities are the most valuable. Our use case focuses primarily on post-execution and lifecycle management, so it's essential to be able to report accurately especially compliance-related reports. SMART is easy to use, especially when reporting. It isn't designed for a hardcore analyst. You don't need to have a background in analytics to run reports, which is huge. I realized I hadn't touched too much on the spending side, but we use SMART for all spending analytics, and any commodity manager procurement professional can go in and run a spending report. That was a business decision to restrict who can run reports since that data can be exported and used. But the reporting capabilities are incredibly easy to use.
Argy Soudi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Procurement Consultant at Ps digital tenders limited
Has connected procurement and contracts efficiently while setup and support still require improvements
Support could be faster for critical issues with SAP Ariba Procurement. When patching happens and new releases come out, it can be hit and miss, though mostly it remains reliable. The on-time response is 99.9999%, but the main issue over the years has been with releases and patching. The initial setup of SAP Ariba Procurement is not straightforward. We have been trying to set it up for two and a half years for the council I work with. The personal account login is ready-made and allows landing page adjustments, but the overall software implementation can take forever and requires multiple teams to work on it.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Automation Anywhere is a pioneer in RPA tools."
"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Automation Anywhere a ten."
"The tutorials that are available from Automation Anywhere are very helpful for newbies to learn the platform and get going with the tool."
"The most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere is the automation that frees up time for our employees to engage with customers."
"We had an old ERP which required human interactions because of the lack of a system, and what we did is have the robotics read an invoice and plug it directly into our ERP, avoiding the extra steps, saving about an hour-and-a-half a day and 20 percent of an FTE."
"Automation Anywhere and even previous versions, which I've worked on, have good core functionality. The core functionality of being able to automate and build a solution that is local and low code is one of the key differentiators that's allowed us to find success."
"The most valuable feature is its Excel integration."
"It frees individuals up from mundane tasks so they can concentrate on being more active and creative other things that they need to do."
"Among the most valuable features are the ability to send out purchase orders, create catalogs, and accept invoices through procurement. And the reporting function is robust."
"The source-to-pay functionality has contributed to the digital transformation of our company."
"I love it because everything is done within the contract module. The previous tool that we had really acted more as a repository, whereas this is the lifecycle. Once a business owner gets to the point where they want to enter into a contractual relationship with a party, from that point, including the drafting of it through to the signature on it, it covers the lifecycle. It's from the beginning to the end to even the archiving. It's all done within the tool, including e-signature."
"From a contract perspective, in my opinion, SMART has improved things a hundred-fold."
"The sourcing module is a place we can always go to find all the information we submitted to a vendor and what they submitted back to us, and it is really meaningful and effective in getting that information out to the vendors."
"Spend gives us a way to put all of our spend in one area and use a category hierarchy to pull real-time spend data."
"It's really simple to use. That's one of the reasons we chose GEP over some of the others. It's very Google-like. On the homepage, you just type whatever you need. And there are tabs that can come up if you're looking for a certain word or phrase..."
"We have absolutely seen ROI; we track all of our savings, but it allows us to do a lot more."
"Ariba allows us to manage our suppliers seamlessly."
"I like the guided buying features."
"Salesforce provides me with the ability to create reports based on various parameters."
"It is one of the best tools in the market."
"The best thing about SAP Ariba Procurement, in comparison to a lot of its competitors, is that if the company has someone who knows how to configure it, they can do a lot of the process building themselves."
"We made custom enhancements to suite our business process."
"The best features are the ease of use and the workflow management that allows me to understand every step in the approval process so that I can forecast the time through my request and its approval."
"SAP Ariba Procurement is worth the money as a tool because it connects all departments in one."
 

Cons

"Triggers work in the attended mode on Automation Anywhere. I would love it if we could use triggers in the unattended mode too. This way we can use the feature more in our IT sector. E.g., when any service or folder is accessed by unauthorized person, we want to be able to get an immediate trigger, even on "out of office", this would be helpful for my organization."
"Pricing with respect to the competitors is more."
"Our users would like more online community forums where they can exchange information. I would also like a better way to monitor and manage all the automations we have running within our systems because our CoE governance must be robust so we are always aware of what's happening."
"I struggled with understanding the use of different variables during my initial time with Automation Anywhere."
"The optical character recognition of various documents and templates, particularly when using the Arabic language, has room for improvement."
"The GUI can be improved by making it more user-friendly."
"I feel a lack of convenience when I try to scale it."
"The quality and speed of Automation Anywhere's support need significant improvement."
"Quite frankly, we're tired of informing GEP. They should be scrubbing from the left and right and from top to bottom to make sure that anything that they're releasing is fully tested."
"If our organization could use it as a full-fledged solution, then it would be valuable and give a return on investment. However, since we are not currently using it as a full-fledged solution, even facing some bugs and problems with the synchronization with some of the internal software, we are not able to use it in a full-fledged manner."
"The manuals, especially the ones for the suppliers, are currently available only in English. If these can also be translated into different languages, that would be excellent."
"The loading of the contracts could be a little bit easier."
"We didn't like their dashboard initially, but they responded to that very well."
"We didn't like their dashboard initially, but they responded to that very well. They've given us some customizable dashboards and have also made it so that the dashboards can be exported into PDF and other formats, so that we can share them with the rest of the company... That was a weakness at the beginning, but one that they have responded to adequately and we're really pleased with the result."
"Very recently, they implemented a customer success team to manage our expectations and communicate them to their technical team. That function is relatively new and some work needs to be done to build that connection so that it's a little more seamless."
"One of the areas where they could do better is by creating more standard templates when it comes to IT cost. IT cost has various components to it and if I want a vendor to be able to reply about cost related to IT, I would have to create that template. If I want them to tell me the hardware costs, the software costs, the professional services costs, the cloud or subscription costs, etc., I would have to build that template myself. Once I built it, I could save it and use it again and again. But sometimes building a template takes a lot of time."
"SAP could make it easier for people to become SAP Ariba consultants within the SAP ecosystem."
"Gaining access to the sourcing project by the supplier needs improvement."
"On the sourcing, it could be easier to import the documents you want, so if you want items to be bid on, it could be a bit easier to import that from a spreadsheet."
"Salesforce is expensive, with a subscription-based model."
"I would like the solution to be more automatic."
"They should make the solution more user-friendly."
"The SAP portion of the procurement is not always obvious or user friendly."
"I would like to see more reports coming out of Ariba and more insights because it has to work in connection with SAP. So unless I run SAP and Ariba, I have to run. I am not able to see the utility of Ariba."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Automation Anywhere has an advantage in terms of licensing. It is more cost-efficient compared to all other RPA platforms. It is a recommended solution when clients need a cost-efficient automation tool to perform unattended automation."
"Costs savings have been seen by employing bots for multiple shifts instead of people."
"Their overall pricing falls in the middle of the market. Cost-wise, Automation Anywhere is quite expensive because of their analytics, IQ Bots, and MetaBots. For a standalone machine, the pricing is okay. When adding in the licensing for IQ Bots (or MetaBots), it can become quite costly."
"We have seen a return of investment because it takes less time to market in our current process. I would estimate a times savings between 20 to 30 percent."
"The pricing strategy for us is one license for development. It is more complicated than that depending on the options you choose."
"The cost of Automation Anywhere is high in Turkey due to the weak economy."
"I believe it is $10,000 for Bot Creator."
"The licensing fees are approximately $10,000 USD for between five and ten users."
"If our organization could use it as a full-fledged solution, then it would be valuable and give a return on investment. However, since we are not currently using it as a full-fledged solution, even facing some bugs and problems with the synchronization with some of the internal software, we are not able to use it in a full-fledged manner."
"My advice is to think wisely when it comes to estimating the number of licenses that you will require. If you settle on a number too early and you need additional ones, then the extra licenses might be quite expensive."
"The licensing cost depends on the customer."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The license is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business154
Midsize Enterprise82
Large Enterprise536
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
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What needs improvement with SAP Ariba Procurement?
At the moment, I don't have any specific reasons for improvement areas in SAP Ariba Procurement. The main improvement...
What is your primary use case for SAP Ariba Procurement?
I am a customer of this tool, and I use SAP Ariba Procurement for my regular procurement roles. This software is used...
What advice do you have for others considering SAP Ariba Procurement?
In managing supplier relationships and mitigating risks, SAP Ariba Procurement has a very strong role to play. It giv...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
SMART by GEP
Ariba Procurement
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Exxon Chevron Macys
Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT)
Find out what your peers are saying about GEP SMART vs. SAP Ariba Procurement and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.